A different page for the homepage... :P

[Alex Clarke]

Is it possible to setup Zen Cart to display a different page (instead of index.php) as the main homepage?

The reason for this is simple, one of my clients has asked me to setup Zen Cart so it displays a different page (index.php?main_page=welcome) when people first load up the site. Then when they click on 'Online Shop' they are taken to index.php.

However, when people load the website they are taken directly to index.php and not index.php?main_page=welcome.

Is there a way I can change this? Maybe htaccess or some nifty php code?

[DrByte]

/includes/init_includes/init_sanitize.php
line 115 says:

  if (!isset($_GET['main_page']) || !zen_not_null($_GET['main_page'])) $_GET['main_page'] = 'index';

Change $_GET['main_page'] = 'index' to $_GET['main_page'] = 'welcome';
... and save it to the overrides folder

[Alex Clarke]

Thanks for the speedy reply! :)

I've just tried what you said and it worked. However, I am then unable to browse to index.php (which I really need to do).

Is there another solution that you know of?

Thanks for the help so far!

[DrByte]

http://www.your_site.com/ will go to welcome
http://www.your_site.com/index.php will go to your regular index.php

It's all in how you write your URLs

[Alex Clarke]

Just tested this out again and it doesn't appear to work. :|

I've changed the code (like you advised), but I still have the same problem of www.mysite.com/index.php displaying my 'welcome' page.

However, I'm going to work around this by linking to my index page like so...

index.php?main_page=index

Hope that's right... it seems to work this end! :)

Thanks again for the help.

[birdoasis]

Another alternative:

go to www.mysite.com/index.php

View source in ie, or view generated source if you're using firefox.

Save the source as index.html.

Now put that file at the same level as your index.php page.

Now you can edit index.html to show whatever content you want. The links are still php.

If you want to, you can also save every category page as html in the same manor and then change the category links to go to the html pages. It's best to save them in a seperat folder at first, ie: /public_html/htmlpages/ that way when it's time to chang the link, you can do a find and replace on that folder. Once you've changed them, move them to the /public_html/ folder and walla you have an html representation of your website, which is all seo friendly and can be changed independantly of your sites pages.

However keep in mind that once the customer gets to the product level they are back in the php site, and the php links will keep them there. So they will see the other pages after they reach the product level. so keep them maintained as well.

Kind of a double maintance job if you know what I mean.

[DrByte]

John's suggestion is one that will work in many hosting configurations, but, as he mentioned, it's a double-maintenance issue.

Reformatting the URL is the key to making the low-maintenance method I mentioned earlier work -- adding main_page=index is correct.

[Alex Clarke]

Excellent. Thanks for clearing this up! :)

[swguy]

Another possible solution: build the home page however you want, and put the shop in a subdirectory. On the home page, simply have a link to the shop (in the subdirectory). Some folks use this approach, esp. if their site already has a lot of content and the cart came later.

Good luck,
Scott